Join us on Twitter and IRC (#ludumdare on Afternet.org) for the Theme Announcement!

Thanks everyone for coming out! For the next 3 weeks, we’ll be Playing and Rating the games you created.You NEED ratings to get a score at the end. Play and Rate games to help others find your game.We’ll be announcing Ludum Dare 36’s August date alongside the results.

New Server: Welcome to the New (less expensive) Server! Find any problems? Report them here.

And it’s over! Thanks to the 30 guys who actually tried their hands at such a challenging theme!

THEME: Contrasts!

Happening at your house from July 9th all the way to the 15th!

What do I mean with ‘Contrasts’?
I mean everything!

Be it graphics (i. e. green on red), physics (Think magnets) or the gameplay (Die to win). Else, just go crazy and make something that’s the total opposite of a usual game!

RULES:

Do you have that one framework you made, but couldn’t use for LD, because you didn’t want to make it public domain? Here’s your chance. Grab it and use it! (Don’t write your whole game beforehand, though.)

No need to add your source. You can still do that, though.

Feel free to work in a team, if you want to!

More time. I’ll give ya a week. Really relaxed, to get warm for LD.

CHALLENGES:

One week is too easy? Well, try some of these challenges.

Implement a single piece of everything: music, SFX, a single finished sprite – All that stuff. Just use your skills to the fullest.

(EDIT: I hope everyone who got the submission link is happy now! :])

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Came here to say this. In my first LD, one of my playtesters was colorblind. About 5% of males have some degree of color blindness. This is 1 guy in 20, or if we imagine a 1/1 split in sexes, 30 people who submitted games to LD24.

So it is quite important not to base your game only on color differences, specially green/red ones.

But on the other hand, the game could help people discover if they have red-green colourblindness.

You could introduce other disabilities and find that a game design is bad because it’s not considerate to those people: People with missing limbs can’t play games that require two hands. People with motor-control disorders can’t play twitch games. etc

On the whole, I think it’s best if the default design is to cater for the majority, and since no disability affects the majority, the default design shouldn’t consider disabilities.

But if it’s one’s intent to design games for a specific minority (such as “I make games for people with motor-control disorders”), then that’s fine.

“On the whole, I think it’s best if the default design is to cater for the majority, and since no disability affects the majority, the default design shouldn’t consider disabilities.”

It’s easy to think “disabled” people can go to hell when you’re not concerned, but it’s not fun when you are. Of course it’s difficult to make a game that *everyone* can play, but it’s not a reason to purposefully ignore all so called minorities.

Using your logic, we shouldn’t make games at all, because there are a lot of blind people. Is making games with any graphics “purposefully ignoring all so called minorities”?
Repeating after digital_sorceress, I agree that the default design shouldn’t consider disabilities. If someone wants to make a game for a specific minority, (s)he’s free to do it. That being said, I also recommend using a better choice of colours than red/green, if it doesn’t make a difference.

Making a game playable by blind people requires quite a lot of trouble.

Making a game playable by color-blind people requires only some care when picking the color-scheme of a game, and/or adding some non color based clues (think Ticket-to-Ride: they add small symbols in addition to the wagon colors for this express purpose).

I didn’t mean to say that “colour blind people should go to hell”. Far from it. In fact, I did recommend a better choice of colours, if that’s possible. In fact, I’ve played some games during last few Ludum Dares, that could’ve been played by *blind* people, and I think they were really awesome just because of that.

I just don’t think that creating game in red/green is “purposefully ignoring” people with disabilities. The logic is the same when I say that “games with graphics PURPOSEFULLY ignore blind people”. The word “purposefully” here is unjustified.

that comment isn’t even random, that was the first thing that came to my mind when i saw the theme picture

@all: don’t – use – red/green. poor colorblind people. i was surprised about the amount of people i know that are colorblind. logged in just to post this comment

btw @digital_sorceress: people who are colorblind probably know they are. there are enough test images that you get in school books when you are like 12. and people with missing limbs still want to play, even if they can’t give a full 100%. check for youtube, the dance dance revolution guy with one leg

In terms of actually designing for colorblindness, it’s really easy to use ‘blue’ for good and stick with ‘red’ for bad. You can also use positional or textural redundancy on the signals (many puzzle games use shapes or patterns on their puzzle pieces, traffic lights don’t put all the lights in the same place so even if all the lights were the same color you’d still be able to tell them apart). I still remember not being able to play a game with my friends because you couldn’t choose team colors and the first team was red, the second was green.

Just to add my two cents to the color-blind-ness discussion. If you make sure that your red and blue aren’t only differentiated by hue, but also by value and saturation, it should still be possible to keep them straight correct? I don’t know much about r/g colorblind, but I’d assume they’d appear to be the same but could still be perceived as different shades.

I’m going to have to bend the rules a little…
I’m DYING to be in this MiniLD, and seeing that I have to leave for a vacation on the 12th, I’ll just start working tomorrow and submit my game on the 11th. That means I’ll still work one week, except I’ll only start earlier.

I have vacation right now, so I’m in, but I think I’ll just use black and white…
At the moment I don’t have any idea what the game could look like but it’s a week!
For some other informations:
– as usual for me I’ll use C++, SDL, OpenGL and I’ll look for an portable sound library because

I have vacation right now, so I’m in, but I think I’ll just use black and white…
At the moment I don’t have any idea what the game could look like but it’s much time until end limit!
For some other informations:
– as usual for me I’ll use C++, SDL, OpenGL and I’ll look for an portable sound library because
– maybe I’ll make my first porting experience in this MiniLD (for Linux with VirtualBox)
– assuredly with horrible graphics cause I’m not a graphicer…
– solo
– I’m trying to have more gameplay than my last LD game…
so that will be fun

Hello, Im entering this event, and was woundering what ALL the rules are, how i enter, what i have to do, exactly when i can start, i have never enter’d a ludum dare event, nor do i know much about them, could someone give me a run by of everything i need to know? Thanks

Prior to a main LD event, it makes sense to hold the miniLD a week earlier, so it isn’t overshadowed with hype for the main event, people coming and saying they’re ready for august, theme suggestions, PoV’s “LD is coming” post, etc..

afaik it used to be done that way.

I think people just remember the times that miniLD has been held mid month, so feel permitted to arrange it for that time. No doubt they’re excited to get it underway, so would rather see it sooner than later.

In regards to the first point under Rules, did you mean to say “Public Domain”? From what I can tell by the officially posted rules you still retain the rights to your code and aren’t required to make it open source. Making your source code visible to the public does not have the same implications as making it public domain.

While technically true, people may still use source code that is made visible, whether it is public domain or not.

The example that springs to mind is notch’s minicraft game from december last year. Within one day, some people had made mods of the game using his source, uploading branches to github etc, despite having no permission to do so at that time.

The simple fact is that once it’s out in the wild, it’s not hard to copy-paste bits out of it, or to mutate it into an unrecognisable form. You can’t realistically detect such infringements, let alone chase them up.

Yes but it still boils down to legal usage vs illegal usage, freely giving your code away vs having your code stolen. The task of dealing with illegal usage is up to the owner but such a distinction between code that’s publically visible and code that’s public domain is important none-the-less.

What’s with this “?action=preview” thing in the URL of the link to view the entries? It messes everything up for me, I end up with only 13 games instead of 30, and my entry doesn’t appear with the latest changes I operated 😮

Anyways, congratz to those who were able to finish something in time ^^